"The issue's not inspectors. The issue is that he (Iraqi President Saddam Hussein) has chemical weapons and he's used them," Cheney said in an interview with CNN.

"The issue is that he's developing and has biological weapons. The issue is that he's pursuing nuclear weapons."

While pressing for a return of UN weapons inspectors to Iraq, Washington fears Baghdad will use the issue to stonewall and dupe the international community.

US officials instead appear to be laying the early groundwork for military action against Saddam's regime, after identifying Iraq as part of an "axis of evil" along with North Korea and Iran.

"I think it would be a great tragedy if Saddam Hussein were to be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons, and that's one of the concerns I shared as I traveled through the region last week," Cheney told NBC television.

"He (Saddam) knows we're deadly serious. Our friends and allies in the region know we're deadly serious and that we do need to find a way to address this problem," he noted.

President George W. Bush said Friday that he had "no imminent plans" to attack Iraq but said even the Iraqi leader knew the United States will eventually "deal" with him.

Speaking on the sidelines of a UN anti-poverty summit in Monterrey, Mexico, Bush said he "cannot allow" nations armed with weapons of mass destruction and hostile to the United States -- like Iraq -- to team up with terrorists like the al-Qaeda network blamed for the September 11 attacks on US targets.

"The president's been very clear that we will do everything we need to do to make certain that that doesn't happen," Cheney said on NBC.

On Friday, US officials accused Iraq of trying to distract the United Nations from its refusal to abide by UN Security Council resolutions by submitting a list of questions about the possible return of international weapons inspectors.

The Iraqis have reportedly asked how the UN could guarantee that its new inspectors would not spy for the United States -- the charge Baghdad leveled at the former inspection team before it was withdrawn in December 1998.

Cheney, who returned Wednesday from a week-long trip to the Middle East, said US allies in the region were "equally concerned about the problems we see in Iraq, specifically the development of weapons of mass destruction by Saddam Hussein."

During Cheney's Middle East tour, several Arab countries voiced opposition to a US military offensive against Iraq and instead urged Washington to focus on settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

But Cheney made it clear that Washington was committed to tackling both issues.

"We have to be concerned both with the Iraqi problem as well as the Israeli-Palestinian problem," he said in an interview with CBS. "You have got to work on both, and to some extent they are interrelated."

Asked about possible links between Baghdad and Saudi-born militant Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network, Cheney told NBC: "We have not been able to pin down any connection there."

He also hinted that British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who has been Washington's closest ally in the antiterror coalition formed after the September 11 attacks on US targets, would play a key role in efforts to highlight Saddam's plan to build weapons of mass destruction.

Cheney also said he was assessing Iraq's offer to receive a US team to look into the fate of a US Navy pilot downed over Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War to see whether it was "a serious proposition."

Iraqi authorities said they were prepared to receive a US delegation to look into the fate of Michael Speicher, whose F/A-18 Hornet aircraft crashed in the desert west of Baghdad on January 17, 1991, the first night of the allied air war against Iraq, apparently after being hit by a missile fired by an Iraqi aircraft.

All rights reserved. � 2002 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.

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